This collection was given to the GTU Library by Frances Crane Lillie's daughter, Mary Prentice
Barrows, in 1977.

Access

Collection is open for research.

Publication Rights

Copyright has not been assigned to The Graduate Theological Union. All requests for
permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the
Archivist. Permission for publication is given on behalf of The Graduate Theological
Union as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply
permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the reader.

Frances Crane Lillie, 1870-1958, was a Chicago philanthropist, married to Frank Lillie, a
zoologist and professor at the University of Chicago. (Obituaries on File, 1979) The
correspondence in this collection is addressed to her from:

1) Baron Friedrich von Hugel (1852-1925): Born in Florence, Italy of an Austrian father
and Scottish mother, the family moved to England in 1867. With no formal education, von
Hugel became a philosopher, author, biblical comentator, and was involved in the Catholic
Modernist movement in England. He was described variously as "the missionary of
Christianity to the intellects of men", "the greatest thinker after Newman", and "it is
this power of holding and practising together the pastoral and philosophical sides of the
spiritual life, which made him ... the most influential religious personality of our
time." Of his book, The Mystical Element of Religion, it was written, "it is quite
arguable that this is the most important theological work written in English in the last
half-century." In 1920, he received an honorary D.D. from Oxford University, the first
Catholic to be so honored since the Reformation. (Paul Clasper, The Interpretation of
Christian Mysticism in the Life and Writings of Baron Friedrich von Hugel)

2) Jacques Maritain (1882-1973): French philosopher. He became a Catholic in 1906.
Attracted by the philosphy of St. Thomas Aquinas, he became the leading neo-Thomist of
his time. After the fall of France in 1940, he came Canada as a professor at the
Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, also serving as a visiting professor at both
Columbia and Princeton.

Scope and Content

Some of the letters from von Hugel have been published in Baron Friedrich von Hugel,
Selected Letters, 1896-1924, Bernard Holland, editor (1933 edition). The correspondence
with Maritain centers around bringing him to the University of Chicago to give a lecture
in 1933 or 34.

Container List

Box Box 1

Friedrich von Hugel Letters, 1915, 20-24

Letters, Gwendolen Greene (niece), 1929, 38

Photographs, n.d.

Memorial Holy Cards, 1925

Newspaper articles, 1921, 25

List of quotes from von Hugel letters, c. 1924

Letter announcing von Hugel death, < 1925

Jacques Maritain Letters, 1933-42

Lecture, "Christian Order and the Established Disorder", c. 1933 or 34